


Vault

by Tonko



Category: Avatar (2009)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 05:18:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4509300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tonko/pseuds/Tonko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Norm gets his ikran.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vault

**Author's Note:**

> A fic originally written back in 2011 for an icon challenge on LJ, for this icon:
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> Mention of a couple of OCs, since the main na'vi characters won't be the ones training my man Norm. Vague Norm/OC.

Norm looked over his shoulder at Jake who was squatting back by the wall and grinning. Jake was showing his long canines in a way that gave his encouragement a competitive bite somehow, as if Jake hadn't been essentially Na'vi for over three years now, and moved in the forest and in the air like he'd been born here, as if it was possible for Norm to compete with him at all. Lzena'ta, who'd trained Norm these past months, was watching as impassively as ever, her stern eyes a familiar weight.

Blood pounding from the climb, the altitude, and the ikran nesting ledge in front of him, Norm still felt the burr of irritation at Jake's challenge, felt the beginnings of resentment that Jake wanted to underscore _again_ how much farther he'd gone than Norm. Jake's grin softened a bit when Norm glared at him, and Norm blinked, startled at how his reaction had burnt away some of the nerves. Jake was doing it on purpose then. He narrowed his eyes in leftover annoyance, adding an abbreviated gesture of gratitude to the expression, and faced the ikran colony again. 

Eyutse couldn't be up here to see this, that was Norm's only regret. If Norm succeeded, though, if he didn't die trying to overcome this last milestone, the healer would be proud. He had told Norm before Norm had realized it himself: "You have come through war, but you haven't left it. Battle is inside you now." Finally waking up again in his healed avatar over a year after the war ended had been such a relief. It had let that impossible drive move him forward again. 

Forward, and backward too. Norm was not a natural fighter. Every time, Eyutse had treated his wounds using the plants he knew. The plants he'd taught Norm about over the many months before he'd had any idea they'd saved his avatar. Eyutse had taught him as a human, and then he'd cared for him as a na'vi hunter apprentice, until Norm left him to head for Iknimaya and the last test. 

No rebreather mask needed on this body, and no oversized human clothing anymore either. Just the scars of his training, the scar of the bullet that had killed him... just himself.

He stepped forward once, and again, letting the stone-weighted length of frond swing from one hand. Ikran squawked and flapped and spilled off the ledge at his slow approach. Colours pale in the misty sunlight: orange and purple, green and blue, grey and yellow. Twin red male ikran snarled and hissed, backing away to retreat among the flock. They parted around a blue-and-grey female who put out a wing claw in a slow, menacing step forward. The leading edges of her wings and the vanes of her tail were darker blue, and her forward pair of eyes, like all ikran, were gold, the second pair white.

He circled slowly as she approached menacingly, his eyes and ears full of her and nothing else. The shapes of Jake and of Lzena'ta, past her head, made him faintly realize she'd shifted him, separated him from them. Jake was standing now, shouting, gesturing, but Norm ignored him. The ikran's stuttering hiss was a rhythm, and he matched it, ducking back from sweeping claws and rolling under a lunge. 

The screech of another ikran almost immediately behind him made him freeze, instincts locking up against each other. Hot breath washed over his back, and his throat seemed to close up.

His ikran launched herself forward--and then over him, the wind of her passage above enough to make him stumble as she slammed bodily into the one that had nearly bitten through his neck. 

He was her prey, and hers alone, it seemed. 

And she was his. 

Her territorial display was his chance, and he ran and leaped onto her back, swinging the weighted frond to wrap around her jaws and yank her chin tight against her neck. 

He held on as she thrashed, and matched himself to her, joining his queue to one of hers while her hissing around the frond muzzle seethed in the air. And then it stopped. The neural link, the tsaheylu, seized them both at once, a bludgeoning of her bright-sharp memories slamming into his consciousness; sky--wind--wings out--night stars--fast prey--bloody meat--low sun--warm cliff--and he let go of the frond, feeling it slide away through the bond, feeling his weight on her, the scrape of stones under her wings as she lurched towards the edge. The spiraling points of view of two more pairs of eyes confounded his inner ear.

A sharp whistle came from behind, the familiar call of Jake's to his ikran, just as Norm felt the world tip.

He slammed into her back, fastened one arm to her wide neck, his other hand gripping her second queue. They fell, spinning. 

Ease out, flat, he willed, his eyes closed tight against whistling wind, vision supplanted by hers. Her memories, new to him but now familiar as his own, gave him a wordless vocabulary of motion with which to communicate.

He felt her move, wings shift, cupping the air. Up, he corrected himself, and dared to open his eyes as she spread her wings fully, slamming into the wind, and then angled up, flapping harder then she was used to, with this new weight on her back. She was more than up to the challenge, and the boulders and treetops fell away beneath them.

This is me, he sent to her dizzily, the feeling of himself, shy caution and stubborn desire to know and newer hunger to fight. He added the sound of his name spoken aloud. Tying those things tightly to her impression of him was instant, and in return she offered her own introduction. Her feeling of herself, wings and teeth and claws, wild pleasure at sunshine and contentment at falling leaves, and--he felt her desire and encouraged it--she turned in a slow spiral loop of flight to demonstrate. Loreyu, he thought dazedly, pairing the motion with the spiral plant-creature that lived on the forest floor. Helicordians, the humans had named them. The Na'vi called them Loreyu. Magnificant Spiral.

She recognized the plant, and with a tart amusement, seemed to accept the association.

Another sharp whistle, this time from overhead. After a long second of remembering there were other people here besides himself and Loreyu, Norm craned his head back to see Jake in flight just above and behind him, and beyond him, Lzena'ta, leaning low on her ikran. She nodded at him, satisfaction evident in her face and the angle of her ears. The wind was too fast for words, but Jake's grin was just as clear. Wide and laughing, like his eyes, with joy they both understood now. Not vicariously shared this time, not enviously pined for either. Jake had gotten there first, but Norm had gotten there too.

Jake dove below and shot forward. Glee spiking in Norm and Loreyu at the same time, she tucked in her wings to follow. A thought of Eyutse rose up, sliding up behind the happiness of his success. Loreyu tugged the thought forward, twinning it with her own matching sensations of comfort--ledges in the sun, solid trees with wide canopies and room between to stretch. Places to be at the end of flight. Places to rest and be safe.

It was no good flying without a place to land.


End file.
